# Sick of browsers - need help
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [May 20, 2013, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886 "2013-05-20T23:55:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2013, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/1 "2013-05-20T23:55:54Z")
Can anyone tell me if a browser exists that actually allows you to scroll the page that’s loading before it’s completely loaded. Sometimes I just need to see the text but twiddle my thumbs as some ridiculous ad or huge picture is being loaded.
I’m praying there’s a browser out there that will accommodate me.
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### Author:  [@Blakeyrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blakeyrat)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/2 "2013-05-21T00:01:58Z")
This is more a function of the site than the browser.
What site are you having this problem on?
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### Author:  [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/3 "2013-05-21T00:04:10Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#):
>
> Can anyone tell me if a browser exists that actually allows you to scroll the page that’s loading before it’s completely loaded. Sometimes I just need to see the text but twiddle my thumbs as some ridiculous ad or huge picture is being loaded.
>
> I’m praying there’s a browser out there that will accommodate me.
Lynx.
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### Author:  [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/4 "2013-05-21T00:05:46Z")
> [@Blakeyrat](#):
>
> This is more a function of the site than the browser.
>
> What site are you having this problem on?
Too numerous to mention.
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### Author:  [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/5 "2013-05-21T00:13:09Z")
You should probably try add-ons. When I installed AdBlock and Flashblock, my browsing sped up significantly. I also have one that blocks most Google tracking, which includes embedded maps and YouTube videos - again, I saw another bump in loading speeds for many pages.
There are even add-ons or options to block the loading of images by default.
All of these can be disabled for certain sites that you can whitelist, or you can load what you want to see one item at a time.
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### Author:  [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/6 "2013-05-21T00:15:31Z")
> [@jz78817](#):
>
> Lynx.
That’s the other extreme. I still want the graphics but I don’t want to be stuck waiting for every piece to completely load.
One site I use (and pay to be a member of) loads a molasses like Amazon ad/link that uses that annoying fade in effect. Until that stupid things completely loads, I can’t do so much as scroll 1 line worth.
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### Author:  [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/7 "2013-05-21T00:17:04Z")
> [@dracoi](#):
>
> You should probably try add-ons. When I installed AdBlock and Flashblock, my browsing sped up significantly. I also have one that blocks most Google tracking, which includes embedded maps and YouTube videos - again, I saw another bump in loading speeds for many pages.
>
> There are even add-ons or options to block the loading of images by default.
>
> All of these can be disabled for certain sites that you can whitelist, or you can load what you want to see one item at a time.
I don’t want them blocked; I just want them to allow me to scroll or click on an already visible link.
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### Author:  [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/8 "2013-05-21T00:18:29Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#):
>
> That’s the other extreme. I still want the graphics but I don’t want to be stuck waiting for every piece to completely load.
>
> One site I use (and pay to be a member of) loads a molasses like Amazon ad/link that uses that annoying fade in effect. Until that stupid things completely loads, I can so much as scroll 1 line.
well, then, you’re stuck. your browser interprets the code it receives from the server, in the order it receives it.
as a relevant question, can you give us an idea of the PC you have and the browser you’re using?
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### Author:  [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/9 "2013-05-21T00:27:05Z")
Sometimes when I just want to read a news story and get really desperate I do Control-U (or whatever the _View Source_ option is in your browser).
For example, when Washington Post stories seem to take forever to load, you can find the actual story in black (Courier) text near the bottom of the Control-U result.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/10 "2013-05-21T00:45:38Z")
An ad blocking plugin is your best bet. Use one that allows you to selectively block specific things.
It’s not really the browser’s fault, as others have said. The browser can’t decide how to lay out and scroll the page until it knows the size and position of all of its contents. And if the designer hasn’t made a point of efficiently constructing the page code to make this information available to the browser early on, it’ll just have to wait till everything has loaded. Good designers already do this, and other sites will slowly catch on.
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### Author:  [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/11 "2013-05-21T01:11:16Z")
> [@tellyworth](#):
>
> An ad blocking plugin is your best bet. Use one that allows you to selectively block specific things.
>
> It’s not really the browser’s fault, as others have said. The browser can’t decide how to lay out and scroll the page until it knows the size and position of all of its contents. And if the designer hasn’t made a point of efficiently constructing the page code to make this information available to the browser early on, it’ll just have to wait till everything has loaded. Good designers already do this, and other sites will slowly catch on.
I thought the stylesheet was interpreted first, and therefore the browser should know how big each piece that’s coming will be. But it sounds like many of you agree it’s ultimately up to the website designer.
Oh well. Thanks to all anyway.
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### Author:  [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/12 "2013-05-21T01:35:27Z")
How fast is your modem? I can’t say I’ve really had to sit and wait for a page to load since the days of 56k and slower POTS modems. Once I made the switch to even the first cable/DSL modems that problem started going away and as site developers started doing things to make their sites load faster it was pretty much non-existent.
I have to wonder if your internet connection or computer is the bottleneck, if that’s the case, it might be helpful to take a different approach.
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### Author:  [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/13 "2013-05-21T01:40:23Z")
No I see this bottleneck no matter what computers I use or wherever I surf. I’m sure the other posters have it right and that it’s the sites themselves that are not “efficiently” laid out.
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### Author:  [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/14 "2013-05-21T01:48:59Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#):
>
> But it sounds like many of you agree it’s ultimately up to the website designer.
No.
It’s up to the owner who pays for it all. They listen to the marketing people. The web site designers gives them what they want, often pushing the latest web techno fad. One of those fads that’s been trending for a while with database-driven sites is to only offer up a bit of content at a time. As you scroll to read more, more content is served up by the web server. If there is a crappy connection between you and that server, your browser may hang.
Since time is money, many of these sites are poorly designed and managed. That adds to your misery.
A lean and mean browser like Chrome can only offer to you what it receives from the server. Crappy web site design, coupled with crappy web servers and network latency probably give you a poor browsing experience.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/15 "2013-05-21T01:54:01Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#):
>
> I thought the stylesheet was interpreted first, and therefore the browser should know how big each piece that’s coming will be.
The stylesheet and markup don’t necessarily tell the browser how big the images and other objects will be. And their positions will depend on the size and location of other objects.
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### Author:  [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/16 "2013-05-21T14:21:24Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#):
>
> Can anyone tell me if a browser exists that actually allows you to scroll the page that’s loading before it’s completely loaded. Sometimes I just need to see the text but twiddle my thumbs as some ridiculous ad or huge picture is being loaded.
>
> I’m praying there’s a browser out there that will accommodate me.
Non-authoritative answer, but this guy says that most major browsers now already do what is called “[incremental rendering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_rendering)”, meaning they DO load pages as they arrive, before the whole thing is done:
[http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/help-whatwg.org/2011-August/000923.html](http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/help-whatwg.org/2011-August/000923.html)
Another site says that an exception is that IE doesn’t incrementally render table-based layouts (as opposed to CSS divs, I would assume).
But are you sure your delays are caused by renderer layout delays? In Chrome’s debug view, I think you can get a timeline of how long each thing takes to load, so you can identify the main culprits. My bet would be the ads and such too, many of which use some annoying combination of flash/java/javascript/silverlight, etc.
ETA: Google also made a similar addon for Firefox: [https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/browser-paint-events](https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/browser-paint-events)
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### Author:  [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/17 "2013-05-21T14:38:26Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#):
>
> No I see this bottleneck no matter what computers I use or wherever I surf. I’m sure the other posters have it right and that it’s the sites themselves that are not “efficiently” laid out.
Can you give us an example of a website that you’re having a problem with so we can try it?
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### Author:  [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/18 "2013-05-21T15:47:42Z")
Using Firefox, I have installed the extension Ad Block Plus, which lets me right-click on an image and choose to block the entire domain that’s serving it, all the way down to just specifically that image. I sometimes us this to block certain ads or even entire ad servers. This does not seem to work on Flash based ads, but I would recommend trying it.
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### Author:  [@Lukeinva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lukeinva)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/19 "2013-05-21T16:53:22Z")
[Opera](http://www.opera.com/) is nice because the ad blocker is built in i.e. you don’t have to install add-ons.
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### Author:  [@Blakeyrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blakeyrat)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2013, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sick-of-browsers-need-help/658886/20 "2013-05-21T20:46:02Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#):
>
> Can you give us an example of a website that you’re having a problem with so we can try it?
Seconded.
Honestly I don’t experience any delay like the one you mention on any of the sites I visit frequently-- I have definitely seen it in the past, however.
If you don’t want to post the link here, why not contact the site owner about it? Maybe they’re genuinely not aware of the issue.